Ubuntu Trusty was released in April 2014, and support for it (including security updates) will cease in April 2019. We need to shut down all Trusty hosts before the end of support date to ensure that Toolforge remains a secure platform. This migration will take several months because many people still use the Trusty hosts and our users are working on tools in their spare time.

Initial timeline

2019-01-11: Availability of Debian Stretch grid announced to community

Week of 2019-02-04: Weekly reminders via email to tool maintainers for tools still running on Trusty

Week of 2019-03-04:

Daily reminders via email to tool maintainers for tools still running on Trusty

Switch login.tools.wmflabs.org to point to Stretch bastion

Week of 2019-03-18: Evaluate migration status and formulate plan for final shutdown of Trusty grid

Week of 2019-03-25: Shutdown Trusty grid

What is changing?

New job grid running Son of Grid Engine on Debian Stretch instances

New limits on concurrent job execution and job submission by a single tool

New bastion hosts running Debian Stretch with connectivity to the new job grid

New versions of PHP, Python2, Python3, and other language runtimes

New versions of various support libraries

What should I do?

Some of you will remember the Ubuntu Precise deprecation from 2016-2017. This time the process is similar, but slightly different. We were unable to build a single grid engine cluster that mixed both the old Trusty hosts and the new Debian Stretch hosts. That means that moving your jobs from one grid to the the other is a bit more complicated than it was the last time.